Polk residents pitch in to help in recovery efforts

LAKELAND — At 81 years old and widowed, Carolyn Skelton woke up Monday morning and knew she would never be able to personally handle what she saw outside her windows.

Scattered across the yard of her home at the corner of Edgewood Drive and Fairmont Avenue were large oak and palm branches, bush limbs and a variety of plant debris. She said she had just paid $150 in August to have her trees trimmed but it didn’t completely help diminish the debris onslaught left by Hurricane Irma that passed through Polk County Sunday and early Monday.

“The yard was just covered. I didn’t know where to start, where to ask for help,” said Skelton, whose husband, Robert, died in 1999.

So Skelton — who founded and ran the non-profit Spouse and Family Caregiver Support System from 1989 to 1999 — went to the home of her neighbors, Dan and Harriette Hoover, and asked about hiring help with the yard rubbish. She said Harriette Hoover told her she’d help with “what we can.”

Within an hour, Skelton said the Hoovers and about 10 other people were in her yard and street, cutting, chopping, raking and bagging everything they could to straighten up her yard.

“I was desperate; I had volunteered all my life,” said Skelton, slightly sobbing. “I know how good it feels to volunteer and help others; this time I was on the receiving end.”

The cooperative neighbor-helping-neighbor spirit has shone through the dark aura of post-hurricane despair over the past two days since the center of the Category 2 hurricane passed over Polk County about 2 a.m. Monday.

On Success Avenue in the Lake Morton neighborhood, near noon, Chris Chadwell scurried about the yard of her Success Avenue neighbor, Karen Francis, picking up a myriad of twigs, small branches and leaves that carpeted the lawn.

Chadwell, an administrative assistant with the city of Lakeland, said with city offices closed, she was out early Tuesday straightening up her own yard when she noticed the mess in Francis’ lawn, so she literally decided to lend a hand. Francis is in Miami, where her primary home is located.

“They probably have their hands full in Miami. The least I could do is get the leaf litter raked and picked up,” she said, standing and holding a rake. “She doesn’t know I’m doing this; she didn’t ask. But I thought this is the least I could do, clean up their stuff and get things back to normal.”

From across Florida, millions evacuated as the state faced one of the most catastrophic storms to hit its coasts with tornadoes, flooding and up to 130 mph winds in some places.

Throughout the state, examples of the cooperative spirit between friends, families and maybe even enemies can be found.

As Hurricane Irma flooded the streets of Miami on Sunday afternoon, voices streamed in that city via the walkie-talkie app Zello. According to Mashable, a digital media website, one person said his food was wet and asked for help evacuating; another was compiling a database of people with boats and others willing to volunteer to any rescue effort.

Locally, other efforts in neighborly and cooperative hurricane relief continued for most of the day Tuesday.

Starting about 7 a.m., about 100 students from Florida Southern College volunteered to help clean and spruce up the college’s Lake Hollingsworth campus and Lake Morton Apartments, 175 Lake Morton Drive.

On campus, FSC President Anne Kerr joined in the effort and at Lake Morton, FSC Dean of Students Bill Langston coordinated work among about 10 students, faculty and staff. With the help of FSC Safety Officer John Baldwin, he said the clean-up was a “community thing” to figure out how to get the campus ready for classes again.

Langston didn’t rule out once the campus was clean, going beyond FSC boundaries to help adjacent neighborhoods with all-volunteer crews.

“We’re doing everything we can to ensure we can re-open the campus in a timely fashion and get back to the business of educating students,” he said.

Just up the road from FSC, Brandon and Mackenzie Morgan of Lakeland, along with Ryan Anderson of Winter Haven and a team of about four others used Zello to form the "Polk County for Hurricane Irma" network. Using the app, they dispatched and helped with evacuations across the Lakeland area beginning Monday night. They even hosted a barbecue at their New Jersey Avenue home and without power, used a gas grill and car headlights to serve dinner to a local family without power or much financial resources.

Anderson went into the flooded areas of Kathleen to see whether anyone needed assistance. Other team members went into the Thornhill Estates neighborhood of Winter Haven to help clean debris and trees from the yards of elderly residents.

"I have to say ... to know there have been other people willing to go out and help others in need shows that Polk County has really come together hand-in-hand to help make sure we bounce back from this catastrophe," said Mackenzie, 30, a stay-at-home mother with four children.

In Bartow, more than a dozen young people from the neighborhood and a Lakeland church swooped onto the Sloan house at 1805 Wardlaw Lane on Tuesday to help clear away seven toppled trees littering the yard.

“We have had so many offers for help,” said Shannon Sloan, “and it is incredibly humbling that people are spending their time coming out here, and getting sweaty and scraped up, just to help us,” she said.

Will Brown, 15, was among those from Christ Community Presbyterian Church in Lakeland who volunteered with the cleanup.

“You should help your friends out when they’re in trouble,” he said. “It would take (the Sloans) months to get all this out if they were doing it by themselves.

“We all go to church together, so we have been driving around helping other people from the church,” Brown said. “We’ve helped about 10 families.”

He said he started volunteering right after his own driveway was cleared so he could get out.

“This is definitely the worst we’ve seen, by far,” he said. “This is hard work, carrying everything back and forth in the hot sun.”

Sloan said most of the trees they lost were old oaks that were on the property when their house was built in 2003. A year later, they lost only three trees in hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne.

“That was nothing like this,” she said, “not even close.”

Paul Catala can be reached at paul.catala@theledger.com or 863-802-7533. He can be reached at Twitter @pcat0226. Suzie Schottelkotte can be reached at suzie.schottelkotte@theledger.com or 863-533-9070. Follow her on Twitter @southpolkscene.

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